Spine
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Feasibility of using short message service to collect pain outcomes in a low back pain clinical trial.
Observational study nested within a randomized controlled trial. ⋯ SMS supplemented with phone interviews, but not SMS alone, is a feasible option to collect simple data within a back pain clinical trial setting.
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Longitudinal cohort. ⋯ Patients with lumbar degenerative disorders have health state values similar to patients with chronic renal disease, Crohn's disease, or coronary artery disease. Health state values of patients with different indications for surgery differ at baseline and after surgery. Revision cases have worse baseline SF-6D scores and less improvement in scores at 2 years after surgery than primary cases. Further studies are needed to gain a greater understanding of health state utility values in patients with lumbar degenerative disorders.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Effect of core stability exercises on feed-forward activation of deep abdominal muscles in chronic low back pain: a randomized controlled trial.
A randomized controlled trial. ⋯ Abdominal muscle onset was largely unaffected by 8 weeks of exercises in chronic LBP patients. There was no association between change in onset and LBP. Large individual variations in activation pattern of the deep abdominal muscles may justify exploration of differential effects in subgroups of LBP.
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Multicenter Study
Expression of ezrin, MMP-9, and COX-2 in 50 chordoma specimens: a clinical and immunohistochemical analysis.
Retrospective study. ⋯ En bloc resection with tumor-free margins is seldom feasible, particularly in the sacrum. Intralesional excisions mostly end in early local recurrence; therefore, the demand for further treatment options is frequently posed. The marked trend of the investigated biomarkers of this study may build a starting point for further investigations as molecular targets for future adjuvant therapies in chordomas. Future multicenter studies on larger patients' series are necessary to elucidate these preliminary data and to test new treatment options for patients with chordomas.
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Comparative Study
Diffusion tensor imaging in pediatric spinal cord injury: preliminary examination of reliability and clinical correlation.
The design was a nonexperimental, repeated measures design. ⋯ DTI values had good-to-strong reliability on repeated scans and moderate-to-good concurrent validity with clinical scores. When compared with conventional MRI, DTI values had statistically stronger correlations with the majority of values from the clinical examination.